48 UTILIZATION OP MINUTE LIFE. 



and the harvest is proportionately later. Much care 

 is required in the tedious operation of gathering the 

 cochineal from the cactus or nopal ; it is performed 

 with a squirrel's tail by the Indian women, who for 

 this purpose squat down for hours together beside 

 one plant. The insects are killed either by throw- 

 ing them into boiling water, by exposing them in 

 heaps to the sun, or by placing them in ovens. 

 Seventy thousand dried insects weigh on an average 

 one pound. Dr. Bancroft estimated the consumption 

 of cochineal in England at one hundred and fifty 

 thousand pounds per annum, worth about 375,000 

 sterling, and when Alex. Von Humboldt wrote his 

 ' ' Political Essay on New Spain," the quantity of 

 cochineal exported from Mexico was worth upwards 

 of 500,000 per annum. Since that period the cul- 

 tivated or " domestic" cochineal and the cactus on 

 which it feeds have been introduced into Spain, 

 India, and Algiers, etc., where its cultivation has 

 greatly increased. 



Professor Piazzi Smyth has given an account of 

 the introduction of the cochineal into Teneriffe 

 "Who would have thought in 1835," says he, in 

 the account of his astronomical observations in that 

 island, " that the years of the grape-vine of Tene- 

 riffe were numbered ?" 



Teneriffe had effectively been a vine-producing 

 country for three hundred years ; and when a gen- 



